This component of an element specification describes the rendering or appearance intended for all occurrences of the element in a specified context for a specified type of output. The rendition element, by contrast, describes the actual rendering or appearance of all occurrences of the specified element in a source document. The useSourceRendition attribute may however be used to indicate that formatting information provided by a rendition element is to be combined with any provided by an outputRendition element.

It is strongly recommended that the W3C Cascading Stylesheet language (CSS2 or later) be used to express the required formatting information.